Serenity Now
2013 · 1m
Directed by Simon Cartwright
Genres: dark comedy, experimental, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
In a train compartment, a man is undone by his seatmate's thoughtless habit of resting his shoes on the seats, his irritation escalating into sweaty, violent flashes of war and horror imagery in this 72-second Apocalypse Now-inspired pamphlet.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 72-second Apocalypse Now riff about a guy losing his mind over shoe etiquette—it's aggressively stupid in exactly the right way, the kind of premise that would make most programmers roll their eyes and Felix laugh until it hurts. The escalation from commuter rage to war-trauma hallucinations is so tonally unhinged it borders on genius.
Cartwright leans on the Coppola reference with deliberate formal awareness, using rapid montage and visual collapse to situate this miniature in a lineage of psychological breakdown cinema; it's a measured compositional exercise even as the content spirals into absurdity.
The decision to collapse the mundane into the apocalyptic through pure montage—letting the shoe-rest trigger genuine horror imagery rather than playing it for laughs—is the hinge the whole thing turns on, and in 72 seconds Cartwright makes you believe it.
Reviews
Simon Cartwright livrait un pamphlet aussi concis qu'appuyé avec le très très court-métrage « Serenity Now ». Par le biais d'une animation stop motion qui permet de désamorcer un ton très cynique de la condition humaine moderne, Simon Cartwright exulte les tensions et paradoxes qui écartèlent les contemporains en proie à leurs sentiments les plus forts, les plus violents.